As an important part of American daily life, Los Angeles has never been short of parties of all kinds, nor is it short of 'party creatures' who attend one or two hundred parties every year.
Simon Westeros's 23rd birthday party was, of all parties, both special and not special.
In the mansion halfway up the Palisades, a carefully prepared birthday party on the evening of February 22nd allowed some people to expand their connections, others to gain bragging rights, and Simon himself also received gifts that he could unwrap for the entire weekend. It can be said that The guests and hosts enjoy themselves.
After the birthday party, the public relations for Hollywood awards season has also entered the final sprint stage.
Due to the Gulf War, this year's 61st Oscar Awards ceremony was scheduled for a later date on March 25.
Daenerys Entertainment's main award-winning film "Dances with Wolves" this year has been gaining momentum throughout the awards season since its release on November 2 last year. After winning a number of important awards at the Golden Globe Awards in January, the recent Various trade union awards and Film Critics Association awards are also killing everyone.
Among all the Oscar nominations that have been announced, "Dances with Wolves" has also become the most nominated film at the 61st Oscars with a total of 12 nominations.
However, what attracted the most attention was the film’s box office performance.
From November 2nd to February 21st before Simon's birthday, it was released for 16 weeks. "Dances with Wolves" had no potential as a box office dark horse at the beginning. With the continuous stimulation of the film's reputation and awards season popularity, it has unknowingly become It has accumulated a North American box office of 113 million U.S. dollars, becoming the third film produced by Daenerys Entertainment at the end of last year to exceed 100 million in North American box office.
Looking back at the entire year of 1990, among the films produced by Daenerys Entertainment, the North American box office films that exceeded 100 million include "Pretty Woman," "The Last Days," "Sleeping with the Enemy," "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," " "Dances with Wolves", "Pink" and "Home Alone" seven.
All seven films ranked among the top ten at the North American box office list in 1990. Among them, "Home Alone", "The Last Days", "Pretty Woman" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" independently released by Daenerys Entertainment have firmly occupied the top four positions in the annual box office list.
With the strong box office momentum of "Dances with Wolves", this film's total North American box office is almost destined to squeeze out the Paramount film "The Hunt for Red October" which is temporarily ranked fifth, making Daenerys Entertainment's The film completely occupied the top five positions on the box office list in 1990.
In addition, as of December 31, 1990, the cumulative domestic box office of these seven North American films with box office exceeding 100 million US dollars reached US$910 million. This is equivalent to 17% of the total North American box office of 1991, which was US$5.26 billion.
There are more than ten other films related to Daenerys Entertainment such as "Children of the Corn 2", "The Evil Dead 3", "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle", "Dangerous Days", etc., and the total North American box office also reached 3.5 billion, accounting for 6% of the North American box office share in 1991.
Taking the two together, the films produced by Daenerys Entertainment accounted for 23% of the total box office share in North America last year.
Moreover, this does not include the box office revenue of films such as "Home Alone" in 1991, so it is not rigorous.
According to this calculation method, the 1990 box office of films such as "One Flew Over the Child", "Batman Begins" and "Driving Miss Daisy" that were released at the end of the previous year should also be included in the calculation.
Once this happens, the proportion of box office controlled by Daenerys Entertainment will easily exceed 30%.
With the formal completion of equity transfer between Daenerys Entertainment and MCA shareholders at the end of February, in 1991, as long as the films produced by Daenerys Entertainment can continue to maintain the box office momentum of the previous two years, this company will definitely be able to divide and control the North American box office share. More than 40%.
This possibility is actually very high.
Because, while other movie studios were still releasing 'warm-ups' for the 1991 box office, Daenerys Entertainment's first box office dark horse of the year had already appeared.
"Tokyo," which opened on February 8, quickly reached a cumulative US$49.69 million at the North American box office within three weeks of its release as of February 28. Moreover, the box office of this film in the third week dropped only 16% compared to the second week, and the long-term trend is very obvious.
The cumulative box office in three weeks is close to 50 million U.S. dollars. Coupled with such an obvious long-term trend, it is almost certain that the North American box office of "The Stars" will exceed 100 million U.S. dollars.
Also on February 28, as the multinational forces officially ceased their offensive against the Iraqi army, the 42-day Gulf War officially ended.
This war allowed many countries to see the major trend of modern warfare transforming from mechanization to informationization. In future wars, human sea tactics are destined to be difficult to play. The almost negligible role played by the Soviet Union in this important regional war further indicates that the Red Empire is getting closer to collapse.
On March 1, the day after the Gulf War was declared over, North American stock markets surged across the board, with the Dow Jones Index and the S&P 500 index both having their highest gains of more than 5% that day.
What many people thought was a protracted war ended so quickly. The United States, which collected a large amount of military expenditures from European and Middle Eastern countries before the war, undoubtedly became the biggest winner of this war.
It is not only the devastation of the war that has caused the U.S. stock market to rebound in the past month or so, but the direct war benefits obtained from the military expenditures provided by various countries have reached 19 billion U.S. dollars, which has largely alleviated the growing domestic fiscal deficit in the United States.
The Bush administration has gained political achievements and benefits through this war, and its domestic support rate has been rising steadily.
Simon knew, however, that the recovery of the North American stock market did not mean the recovery of the U.S. economy. The federal economic downturn would continue throughout 1991, which also paved the way for the Bush administration's defeat in the 1992 presidential election.
The expansion of the Westeros system has not been affected at all by the economic downturn in the United States.
As for AOL, as of the end of February, the free trial period for Internet access users in January has ended.
Among the 810,000 free trial users who connected in January, more than 430,000 were eventually converted to official users, with the conversion rate reaching 53%, far exceeding AOL's initial expectations of 20% to 30%.
Throughout February, the number of AOL free trial reservation users dropped sharply to 1.6 million from 2.3 million in January, but the number of trial users who successfully completed the connection increased to 970,000, basically reaching one million users per month. The goal.
The number of users waiting in line for a free trial has exceeded 2 million.
The major telecom operators in the United States, except for AT-T, which is still huge after being split up, and companies such as Seven Little Bell, the number of users is basically within the tens of millions.
With the Internet industry experiencing such an obvious explosive trend, major operators no longer dare to look down upon it.
In addition to three regional telecom operators such as Bell Atlantic, which has signed an exclusive agreement with AOL, other telecom giants, including AT-T, have begun to rapidly lay out the Internet industry in the past two months, or simply acquired their own operating areas. A World Wide Web access service company authorized by Yigrit, or authorized by Yigrit to establish its own Internet access service department.
Because of the industry trends brought about by the explosion of the Internet industry, Simon's advantage in buying Bell Atlantic in advance has become increasingly obvious.
If the Westeros system had not already taken control of Bell Atlantic, the strongest among the three regional operators, and driven by the huge interests of the Internet industry, even if they were bound by exclusive contracts, if the three regional operator giants had imposed restrictions on AOL at the same time, Pressure, AOL will definitely have to make big compromises.
Now, Bell Atlantic is firmly on the side of AOL. The other two companies, which happen to be located on the east and west coasts of the United States, are difficult to unite. Therefore, AOL can continue to maintain its advantage in the exclusive agreement.
In comparison, most of the Internet service providers in other regions had to accept the "recruitment" of the operator giants, and basically all of them quickly fell into the fate of being acquired. Otherwise, they will be squeezed out by the cutoff of line network resources by the operator giants who want to dominate the ISP business.
With the explosion of the Internet industry, Igret's high degree of monopoly on World Wide Web technology has gradually attracted the attention of major manufacturers.
Of course, just pay attention for the time being.
Because Yigrit maintains a very open licensing attitude, and Yigrit's losses exceeded 50 million US dollars in January alone, its business prospects are far inferior to those of the ISP business. Therefore, Yigrit's graphical interface browsing The monopoly of servers and the various services of the Igret Portal have not aroused the covetousness of other telecommunications companies.
That's right, despite sparing no effort to expand, Igret Company only had revenue in the first month of 1991. Although its revenue exceeded US$15 million, its overall loss exceeded US$50 million.
In order to increase the visibility of the portal business in the minds of the general public as soon as possible, Igret invested US$20 million in marketing expenses in the past month.
Each information section of the portal has tapped a large number of news talents and columnists from traditional print media platforms to build Yigret's content team, and the investment has been equally huge. Coupled with investment in e-mail services, social network services, online games, and Igret's own ever-increasing technology research and development expenditures and basic equipment expenditures, this ultimately resulted in the company's 'initiative' loss of US$50 million in just one month. .
Of course, in Simon's view, this speed of burning money is actually just a small incident. There are many Internet companies that burn billions of dollars a year. The money that Ygritte is burning now is definitely much greater than the returns that Simon remembered from burning money in the red ocean market of the Internet industry.
As the entire new technology field begins to pay attention to the Internet industry, Yigrit, which has accumulated a large number of technology patents and software products in the early stage, has grown as various operators have increased demand for IE browser software, World Wide Web tool software and portal advertising. Rapidly increasing, Igret's revenue growth in 1991 will also accelerate.
As long as the current performance growth rate can be maintained, Igret's full-year loss in 1991 is very likely to be controlled within 500 million US dollars, which is far from exceeding Simon's endurance limit.
Under the trend of rapid user growth for two consecutive months, in the face of the continuous rumors of AOL's IPO, various Wall Street investment banks have all valued this new technology company at more than 1 billion US dollars. Morgan Stanley's Analysts even gave it a valuation of $2 billion.
It is conceivable that after completing the three-month free trial plan, AOL's IPO valuation will definitely increase again.
In addition to the general direction, Westeros Company also continues to make layouts in some seemingly small new technology industry fields.
After C girl Claire showed Simon her business plan, she quickly established a card camera company with the senior engineer who resigned from Kodak.
At the same time, Claire also contacted a graphics processing software company that had just been established for more than a year.
The developer of the software is named Thomas Knoll. Knoll first used Apple computers to develop a graphics editing software for processing black and white images in 1987, named Display. After two years of continuous research and development and improvement, this software The name was also changed to Photoshop, and it began to be used in scanners and digital typesetting.
After Simon got the news, he directly instructed James Raybould to buy out the software.
However, the Noel brothers did not agree to sell the software, but they also hoped to cooperate with the Westeros Company.
After several negotiations between the two parties, Westeros Company invested US$800,000 and obtained 50% of the shares of the company established by the Noel brothers. At the same time, the Knoll brothers will continue to master the development of Photoshop software.
Simon didn’t want the professional-level image processing software in his memory to be reduced to the existence of beautiful pictures, so he instructed the Noel brothers to develop two software at the same time. One will continue to deepen the professional-level functions of Photoshop. In the future, it will be through Igret It is sold in online software stores, and the other one is a simplified free version of Photoshop, specially provided to Claire's card camera company as supporting software.
San Francisco.
Inside the mountain mansion in Woodside.
The time is March 5th, and Simon came to Silicon Valley again yesterday to attend the monthly meeting of several Yigrit companies.
The female assistant did not squeeze herself anymore last night. Simon got up early and went for a morning jog in the Woodside Mountains as usual.
At eight o'clock, when we returned to the villa, Jennifer had already prepared breakfast.
The two sat down in the restaurant, Jennifer ate breakfast and casually talked about work: "I think if Ygrit continues to develop like this, sooner or later it will encounter antitrust obstacles. Now you want to build hardware Ecological chain, this will directly touch the interests of traditional technology giants such as Intel and IBM."
Simon glanced at the newspaper at hand, picked up the tableware and said with a smile: "Think carefully about my personnel arrangement for Ygritte."
Jennifer tilted her head slightly and thought for a moment without knowing why, and quickly caught something and said: "Bartz is in charge of the software business, and Bezos is in charge of the network business. Also, next, Ferguson may be in charge of e-commerce. Well, you Have you made up your mind to split Ygrit from the beginning?”
"If we can not split it up, of course it is best not to split it up," Simon nodded and said: "However, this possibility is very low. The major operators in North America have now begun to enter the ISP business, which means that the Internet industry The expansion speed will be further accelerated. Just because Yigrit is still losing money on a large scale, many people cannot see the business potential contained in it. In addition, this company is involved in a completely emerging technology industry and will not encroach on traditional giants. benefits, so it has not encountered too many obstacles. However, when the industry expands to a sufficient scale of output value, we cannot expect this state to continue forever."
Splitting Yigeret was indeed Simon's idea from the beginning, because the industrial value contained in the fields Ygritte is involved in is too great.
Moreover, Simon did this mainly out of consideration for Yigrit's own development. He did not want Yigrit to suffer from serious big company diseases early because he had too many resources. The Internet era has just begun, and there are still many challenges to face in the future. If you don’t make progress and remain complacent, no matter how many resources you have, you will only encounter the fate of being eliminated in the future.
While the two were chatting, Simon's personal mobile phone suddenly rang.
He answered it casually, but before he could speak, a series of little screams came from the other side: "Ahhh..."
This is Janet's voice.
Simon showed a helpless expression and came again.
Just as she was about to say a few words of comfort, Janet excitedly continued on the other side of the phone: "Dear, yes, yes, I'm pregnant. Come back soon."
Simon was stunned for a moment, confirming that he heard correctly, and subconsciously stood up.
Jennifer looked over suspiciously.
Simon stood across the dining table and chatted with Janet in a soft tone for a while, promising to rush back to Los Angeles immediately before hanging up the phone.
Jennifer also understood after listening to the conversation between Simon and Janet.
Knowing that Simon had been tormented a bit by Janet because of the child's affairs during this period, Janet finally got her wish before her 31st birthday. Although she felt a little bit unhappy, the female assistant still put down the tableware and said: "In this case, let's do it now Just go back."